Three Wisconsin prisons have such a
shortage of correctional officers they are on some form of lockdown or as the
agency prefers modified movement. For example at the maximum security while
pun prison the vacancy rate for guards sits at about 53 percent at the Green
Bay prison it's a 41 percent vacancy rate and it's Stanley it's nearly 44
percent. Ads looking to attract people to become corrections officers have been
hitting airwaves and online recently. The Department of Corrections expects to
be able to recruit and retain more officers with the newly approved pay
bump from $20 an hour to $33 a raise that went into effect this week. The
Wisconsin Policy Forum just released a report titled Prison Blues which
explored prison spending in the state. Research Director Jason Stein joins us
on this and thanks a lot for being here. My pleasure thank you. So the Department
of Corrections describes a dire staffing shortage in its prisons as
evidenced by the lockdown of inmates. Max Kertie Wopon as we just mentioned
with that 53 percent vacancy rate. How should this pay bump ameliorate this
problem? You know it's going to help obviously across the labor market we've
seen employer challenges turn over rates rising and that's across the
government but in our state institutions our 24-7 institutions that's where it's
been most acute. I think the challenges in 2022 there were more than 2,000
vacancies within the prison system so when you think about and you can't
simply bring someone in off the street put them in a place like Wopon and have
them walk the line. You have to train these people so they're going to turn
the ship in the water but it's a big ship at a long turn. How long coming has
this pay raise been? You know it took us years to get in this position of across
the government and particularly within the prison system having these
vacancies and this gap between what the state was willing to pay and what people
were willing to do because coming to work every day in a prison is new
slash a very difficult job and so it's going to take time to get out of this
hole. Adding to that problem the state's 37 prisons are over capacity with those
incarcerated and incarcerated and this has long been the case and we
incarcerate more people than neighboring states. Why this mismatch with our
neighbors? You know going back to the 90s Wisconsin built a large prison system
and despite the fact that it's a large system it's been over capacity even when
we dipped in population during the pandemic we remained over capacity. You
know it comes down to we incarcerate at higher rates than our neighbors higher
rates than national average and that leads to per capita spending on
corrections being higher in Wisconsin than in our neighboring states. You know
this is again something that you cannot change overnight but there are things
that the state can do and the state has the resources now to try and bend this
curve over the next generation. And how do you bend the curve in that way?
You know one the biggest contributor to incarceration in the state has been
revocations so it's not people that are committing a crime for the first time
it may be a crime but there are people who've been released on extended
supervision into the community and something whether it's substance abuse
whether it's a mental health challenge whether it's new criminal activity is
landing them back in the system and so the state has been has been testing
methods and has actually lowered that revocation rate and so that will make
a difference going forward but then we also have to ensure that public safety
is maintained while those revocation rates are lowered as well. Right and I
can imagine that's the kind of effort that takes a while to to bring those
numbers down. Correct I mean you know substance abuse mental health challenges
these are very difficult problems to deal with for anyone in the population and
you know one area where the state one bright spot as the state does have within
its large state surplus the ability to invest in targeted to you know to
experiment and invest in targeted methods to try and deal with these problems. So
Wisconsin is spending 2.76 billion dollars on corrections in the current
state budget again more per inmate than surrounding states and is it a
function of just having more inmates and more prisons that we're spending more
than our surrounding states? Yeah it's largely a function of that and the thing
that people need to understand is state prisons are not something that the
federal government is going to give you money for it's not something that any
other state is going to give you money for you're gonna have to pay for that as a
state with your own tax dollars and so finding ways to ensure public safety but
also minimize correction spending over time is going to the savings is almost
entirely going to go to taxpayers if you can thread that needle. Hopefully
people will start threading that needle. Jason Stein thanks very much. Thank you.